Cschmelz, I gather you're in the Spokane area? I'm in Missoula, and I have a Climatemaster Tranquility 27, installed two years ago. It provides heat and air conditioning for our century old stucco bungalo. You might be able to find some of my old posts by searching this forum. I noted just a couple of things in your post. First off, I thought the price for the basic heat pump installation with ground loops was pretty reasonable for this sort of thing. Second, I wondered why your contractor felt the necessity for adding a solar collector to improve the performance during the winter. My thought, and I may well be wrong, is that if the ground loop is large enough and deep enough you should have no need to help it with the water-to-water/solar collector, which stirked me as Rube Goldbergish. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). That assumes, of course, that your 10 tons of heating/cooling is sufficient. As for hot water you may well find that with the desuperheater on at least one of your Climatemasters that you don't need a very large or even efficient water heater. Again, I may well be wrong, but if that heat pump is properly sized and installed and backs up a conventional 40-50 gallon gas water heater you'll have everything you need. Of course, if you have three teenagers you'll need all the hot water you can get, and all my guesses are hereby withdrawn. Caveat: I ain't no engineer or installer, and there are better minds than mind on this forum, but that's my two bits for what it's worth. Good luck, Mark

We are in a city with 5000sq ft of land with more than 1/2 built with garage and house. Geothermal is not physically possible. Even if it was possible, our heating cost is very low, ie less than $1500/year. We do not need AC in Seattle. Let's say that you my heating bill by 50% ie $750 per year. The reality of getting 50% reduction in the heating bill is extremely optimistic. I live in a very HCOLA. I am hugely underestimating the cost of geothermal installation at $20,000. The numbers comeout to 26 year payback. The numbers I calculated is the best case scenario. Our electric rate is 7 cents per KW. I do a lot of cost analysis to see how to create cost effectiveness of my decisions. The biggest unknown is the cost of maintenance which increases the actual cost of the system. When we installed our initial system, we were told 20 year life time. Well it barely made 1/2 of that. It makes a huge impact on the lifetime cost of the system when the appliances do not have real meaningful life time we can 'trust' and to make 'meaningful' calculations. This has been the biggest stumbling block on many of my 'expectations' regarding energy savings; lifetime cost and maintenance cost. No matter where I use the money, if I have to use MY money to keep up the system, it is still costing ME money. At a certain point, I would rather spend more of MY money and pay higher energy bill if I can be guaranteed that the products work without the hassle of repair and replacement. We cannot do a real furnace, ie traditional boiler with a flue, due to lack of space that can vent to the roof. That would require many thousands of modifications to the existing house to accomodate the flue. It is NOT possible. Had I known that the lifetime of condensing water heater(which is what died on me) was 10 years instead of 20 at the time of installation, we COULD have put in a traditional boiler. Unfortunately, we were told 20 to 25 with a savings of energy! The experience from Europe (England mostly) is that the plumbers are telling their customers 10 years for condensing boilers.... This is what led us to remodel and get rid of the flue etc etc.

Not much to say about the details of the installation. Just a 3 ton outside AC condenser on a pad with matching inside evap coil and new lineset. Access is excellent, nobody would even need to get into a crawlspace or attic or up on a roof. Furnace is a Coleman, 3 years old. Ducts are already in place. They do need to run a 35 amp line from the breaker box about 60 linear feet away, and add an exterior 120 VAC outllet. All the work would be done either in the garage or right outside the garage. None of the lines need to be hidden. I'm looking at totally average vanilla HVAC brands and models, e.g. don't need anything fancier than the totally average vanilla Coleman furnace that's already there. Seems like a pretty average job. To be clear, when I referred to online rates from Porch and the like, I wasn't talking about estimates I got from them. I'm talking about their published statistics on costs based on data they have collected from people who have had similar work done in the same geographic area. You don't need a ton of data points to get a pretty good estimate of an average, so unless they are just making up numbers, it seems like an average installation of average difficulty of an average 3-ton air conditioner into a house with existing ductwork is costing people about $5000 in this area. That's why I'm puzzled about getting quotes that are double that. I did get one quote for $6K based solely on written information I provided, but it's not firm because the estimator has not yet seen the house. The house *is* a nice new house, substantially above average for the immediate area, if that has anything to do with it...

An inspection is required to determine what would need to be done. For example, I've lived in a number of older dwellings whose plumbing and electrical were original and it did not mean I had to replace it because It was unsafe or old. In some cases I chose to update...but did it over many years as I had time, or in conjunction with remodeling parts of that house. I'm not saying the OP shouldn't look at updating; however, I am making clear that this is not something that necessarily needs doing immediately.